No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Rethinking the British World
Abstract
This article rethinks the concept of the “British World” by paying close attention to the voices of those who attended the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference. They identified not one, but three different kinds of British world space. Mapped, respectively, by ideas and emotions, by networks and exchange, and by the specific sites of empire, this article suggests that, in the light of criticisms the British World concept has faced, and in the context of recent scholarship on the social and material production of space, this tripartite approach might offer a useful framework for British and imperial historians interested in the history of the global.
... 25 These histories cast Dutchness and Britishness as broad, elective categories of belonging to which one subscribed according to one's loyalties to institutions and symbols rather than one's place within an imperial space. 26 Using the Dutch to think about the Second Empire as capacious is an instructive way of framing the interplay between its political elements. The empire's growth was linked to Dutch history. ...
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire grew through its invasion of Dutch colonies around the Indian Ocean rim. The incursions entwined British and Dutch politics, cultures, and social networks. These developments were significant for the Dutch East Indies, but have received relatively little attention in histories of the Second British Empire. In light of recent interest in Anglo-Dutch interaction, connectivity across empires, and the uses of prosopography to question the boundaries of imperial history, this article uses Dutch biographies to interrogate the relationship between the politics of liberal reform and despotism in the Cape Colony and Java under the British. A dialectic between despotism and liberalism dominates the Second Empire's historiography. Conversely, tracing the biographies of two interstitial figures who passed between the Dutch Empire and that of Britain shows how despotism and reform were connected. The Dutch drew notions of reform from their social networks into the Cape and Java through their manipulation of loyalist rhetoric. Concurrently, the use of such rhetoric legitimized societies and controls linked to the entrenchment of autocracy. This article thus reveals links between connectivity and control in Britain's Indian Ocean empire.
The UK withdrawal from the European Union forced the country to reevaluate its relations with the outer world. These political and ideological searches culminated in the concept of Global Britain. At the same time, they have drawn attention of the academic community to similar intellectual endeavors at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, when British politicians also faced the need for a qualitative reassessment of the empire’s place in the world. In this context historical references can both help to place the concept of Global Britain within a broader ideological and political framework and shed light on some of its less obvious aspects. And it is particularly interesting to compare it with the concept of Greater Britain, which was extensively discussed during that period. The first section of the paper identifies the origins of the Greater Britain concept, as well as its key provisions. The author notes that the idea of ‘Greater Britain’, aiming to create a sort of federation that would bring together the metropole and the dominions, emerged as a response to growing centrifugal tendencies within the British Empire and intensification of colonial rivalry between the great powers. The second section outlines the conceptual core of the ‘Global Britain’, which involves expanding the scope of the UK foreign policy opportunities after leaving the European Union by establishing a more active interaction with countries and regions that were once part of the empire. The paper emphasizes the migration factor, which served as a fundamental element of the British statehood in various periods of its history and became an integral part of the British political identity. The author argues that there is a certain continuity in the ideological and philosophical content of the two concepts, which were both formulated in similar conditions, both originated from the search for new guidelines for the UK policy in a changing world. However, these concepts shouldn’t be confused. Whereas ‘Greater Britain’ was aimed at consolidating the crumbling empire, ‘Global Britain’ is intended primarily to bridge various divides across the society, which in turn implies re-examination of the UK national identity in general. The author concludes that the concept of Global Britain in its current form cannot address these issues, on the contrary, it rather epitomizes the lack of innovative ideas and solutions among contemporary British elites.
In the 1960s, it became apparent that the seemingly strong ties between Britain and the former settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand were in danger of disintegrating. Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in the early 1970s was a symbolic end point to their affiliation. Since belonging is closely linked to emotions, this prompted a re-ordering of emotional practices in Australian and New Zealand society. As Britain’s turn to Europe was interpreted by the majority in these countries as an abandonment, Britishness could no longer be the main self-descriptor of identity, and the “British World” no longer the world to live in. Multicultural policies meant a re-evaluation and re-shaping of social coexistence in Australia and New Zealand. Food cultures as cultural heritage were emotionally reinterpreted and appropriated, as they offered new possibilities for identification in the search for a new national identity. The relationship with neighbors in the South Pacific was also placed on a new emotional footing, while the British were excluded via mechanisms of “emotional othering.” These processes of emotional detachment from Britain had direct influences on how Australia and New Zealand positioned themselves in and in relation to the world.
Nationalised industries had to defend their use of public money, after all, the public owned them, but what did Britain's nationalised airline, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) do to justify its activities? Given that most people could not afford the luxury of flight, between 1945 and 1965 BOAC became an instrument in marketing a resilient, powerful and moralistic nation. Amongst the uncertainties and dislocations caused in Britain's economic, political and social status as a result of the Second World War, aviation was seen as the pathway to economic, political and social prosperity. BOAC's brand was carefully crafted around the issues of the 'national interest' as it sought to orient and align a version of 'Britishness' that was believed to be necessary in the prevailing international political climate. It sought to portray a version of nationalist internationalism, projecting Britain as a powerful yet altruistic nation. In the words of an ex-BOAC Chairman, it was a 'Midwife' that was 'similar to the altruistic, though often rewarding, aid given by a mother to her young or a mother country to its colonies'. BOAC championed Britain's Cold War mixed economy message, believing that it offered an economy that represented fair capitalism. This was primarily a representation targeted domestically at travellers in Britain, helping primarily British citizens to conceptualise not just the world, but Britain's place within it. This thesis uses business records, newspapers and other media to explore the political economy of BOAC's postwar operations between 1945 and 1965, arguing that it helped to market Britain's (somewhat sensationalised) competitive position. Whilst this objective ultimately failed, BOAC, and the subsequent British Airways (BA) continued to see itself as a guardian of stability in the values associated with the British
The ways in which politicians have discussed who, what, and where was considered “uncivilized’” across the past two centuries gives an insight into how speakers in a position of authority classified and constructed the world around them, and how those in power in Britain see the country and themselves. This article uses the Hansard Corpus 1803–2003 of speeches in the UK Parliament alongside data from the Historical Thesaurus of English to analyse diachronic variation in usage of words for persons, places and practices considered uncivil. It proposes new methods and offers quantitative data to describe the period’s shift in political attitudes towards not just the so-called “uncivil” but also the country as a whole.
This article examines a collection of several hundred letters sent to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in 1903. Written by British and colonial subjects from a wide range of different backgrounds and residing across the world, these letters addressed a variety of issues in the political, social, and imperial life of Edwardian British World. The collection offers a window into the minds and lives of a conscious and actively engaged sample of British and colonial subjects. The authors frequently wrote on the subject of British imperialism, sharing their ideas, feelings, and interactions with the empire with one of Britain’s most outspoken imperialists. The letters demonstrate a broad consensus of support for and pride in the empire. The particular ways in which individual authors conceptualised and defined theirs and Britain’s imperial relationships, however, show a variety of disagreements about the present and future of Britain’s place in the world. Nevertheless, these authors recognised their nation was inextricably connected with the rest of the world and could not exist in isolation, and understood and articulated this connection through the language of imperialism.
For historians interested in the settler colonial world, one of Professor John Darwin’s most important interventions has been to argue for the reintegration of the dominions into the wider history of the British empire. In re-engaging with the history of Britain’s white settler colonies in North America, Australasia, and South Africa, Darwin’s work has sought to emphasize the place of the dominions in relation to the rise and fall of the British world system, as well as their value as vantage points from which to consider imperial and global history more generally. In this regard, Darwin’s systemic approach has encouraged a more dynamic conception of ‘British world’ history – one deeply embedded in a series of overlapping imperial, regional, and international contexts. This article focuses on a particular moment in imperial history where some of the internal dynamics of the late-Victorian British world system, and the changing place of the settler colonies within it, were brought into sharp relief: the 1887 Colonial Conference. It argues that we might look to the conference as a valuable window onto the impact of Anglo-Australian relations upon the wider struggle for imperial unity in the 1880s.
Cambridge Core - Latin American History - The Falklands War - by Ezequiel Mercau
This introductory chapter explains that Scottish Presbyterian dissenters have been missing from the historiography on religion and colonialism. It suggests that when dissenters from the Secession churches, Relief Church and Free Church migrated to the settler colonies of Britain’s empire, they exported the disruptive political ideas associated with these churches. This introduction provides an overview of the Scottish politics of dissent. It introduces five Scottish migrants: Thomas Pringle, a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch, a missionary in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang, a minister in Sydney; William Lyon Mackenzie, a journalist in Toronto; and Samuel McDonald Martin, a journalist in Auckland. The introduction suggests that the values of Presbyterian dissent underpinned the politics of these reformers, who couched their political claims in the ‘covenanting idiom’, a Scottish variant of British birthright rhetoric. This introduction also provides an outline of the book. It concludes by suggesting that through studying the connections between these migrants and the reform campaigns they led, we can advance our understanding of colonial politics and the broader significance of these individuals’ careers.
What did Australian modernity look like? Over the last two decades, Australia's entrenched reputation for ‘cultural belatedness’ has been displaced by the study of ‘colonial modernity’. No longer beholden to the idea that a singular modernity was disseminated from core to periphery, scholars now speak of many localised modernities that arose across colonial and provincial sites. According to this new ‘multiple modernities’ paradigm, Australia was home to its own home-grown incarnation of modern life. But what was distinctively ‘Australian’ about Australian modernity? Although widely discussed in recent historiography, scholars have yet to delineate its distinguishing features. This article posits mobility as a central component of the Australian modern. Drawing upon new scholarship in settler colonial studies and transnational history, it argues that early twentieth-century Australia was home to intense cultures of both domestic and global mobility that were entangled with the geographies and anxieties of the settler colonial project. It shows how the nation's ‘unsettled settlers’ also became its chief agents of modernity, and in doing so draws together several strands in recent historiography. Although mobility also signified modernity beyond Australia, it was within this settler colonial nation tyrannised by distance that the modern appetite for motion reached especial heights.
Throughout the period between 1790 and 1914 the governments of the Australian colonies asked their populations to suspend work and amusements and join in collective acts of prayer. Australia’s special days of prayer have much historical significance and deserve more scholarly attention. They had an enduring popularity, and they were rare moments when a multi-faith and multi-ethnic community joined together to worship for a common cause. This article builds on recent work on state prayers in Britain by considering what the colonial tradition of special worship can tell us about community attachments in nineteenth-century Australia. ‘Fast days’ and ‘days of thanksgiving’ had both an imperial and a regional character. A small number of the Australian days were for imperial events (notably wars and royal occasions) that were observed on an empire-wide scale. The great majority, such as the numerous days of fasting and humiliation that were called during periods of drought, were for regional happenings and were appointed by colonial authorities. The article argues that the different types of prayer day map on to the various ways that contemporaries envisaged ‘Greater Britain’ and the ‘British world’. Prayer days for royal events helped the empire’s inhabitants to regard themselves as imperial Britons. Meanwhile, days appointed locally by colonial governments point to the strength of regional attachments. Colonists developed a sense that providence treated them differently from British communities elsewhere, and this sense of ‘national providence’ could underpin a sense of colonial difference—even a colonial nationalism. Days of prayer suggested that Greater Britain was a composite of separate communities and nationalities, but the regional feelings they encouraged could still sit comfortably with attachments to an imperial community defined by commonalities of race, religion and interest.
Within the expanding field of global history, historians often conceive of distinct integrated ‘worlds’: discrete if permeable cultural units capable of coherent study. Some are defined exogenously through factors such as oceanic geography, others are conceived of endogenously through the cultures and identities of their adherents. In this context, this article critically assesses the recent voluminous literature on the British world: a unit increasingly distinguished from British imperial history and defined by the networks and identities of global Britishness. The article argues that the British world, while making valuable contributions to the historiography of empire and of individual nations, fails ultimately to achieve sufficiently clear definition to constitute a distinctive field of study and neglects the crucial concerns of imperial history with politics and power, while flattening time, space, and neglecting diversity. While highlighting many key concerns, other methodologies such as settler colonialism, whiteness studies, or revivified imperial history are better placed to take these on than the nebulous concept of a world. More broadly, an analysis of the British world highlights the problems inherent in attempting to define a field endogenously through a focus on identity.
The University of Birmingham was planned, advanced and established with both national and German models of a University in mind. Civic reasons for the planning of the University need to be viewed within a broader motivational context. Even with a strong sense of civic place, the University was conceived as a modern University with multiple founding visions. The set-up goals shifted as the size and complexity of the University increased and early ideas of social mission were either restricted or largely absent in practice. The paper examines the nature of the original institutional commitment to the ‘civic’ dimension of the University between 1900 and 1914 and highlights the many tensions that emerged between the growing academic standing of the University and its continued enthusiasm for the City and regional links.
The 1982 Falklands War was shrouded in symbolism, bringing to the fore divergent conceptions of Britishness, kinship, and belonging. This article casts light on the persistent purchase of the idea of Greater Britain long after the end of empire, addressing a case that would normally be deemed outside its spatial and temporal boundaries. By highlighting the inherent contradictions of this transnational bond, the South Atlantic conflict had a profound effect on an underexposed British community with a lingering attachment to a “British world”: the Anglo-Argentines. As they found themselves wedged between two irreconcilable identities, divisions threatened to derail this already enfeebled grouping. Yet leaders of the community, presuming a common Britishness with the Falkland Islanders and Britons in the United Kingdom, sought to intervene in the conflict by reaching out to both. That their efforts were met with indifference, and sometimes scorn, only underlines how contingent and frail the idea of Greater Britain was by 1982. Yet this article also reveals how wide ranging the consequences of the crisis of Greater Britain were, and how its global reach was acutely put to the test by pitting different “British worlds” against each other.
This article argues for the importance of an exploration of sporting interactions in the British world. In addition, it presents the case for the adaptation of borderlands theory to the British world framework. Such study of British world borderlands is capable of more accurately capturing the spatial and regional variety of this British world and, in particular, the nascent national identities of dominions such as Australia. Sport is a particularly apt vehicle for the examination of such issues in an Australian context, since playing to the ‘imaginary grandstand’ of international spectators has always occupied a central role in the construction of an Australian national identity. This article uses three brief case studies – cricket, swimming, and Australian Rules football – to explore these theoretical claims.
Frankenberg explores the unique intersection of race and sex as she examines the way that white women relate to racism. She writes from the assumption that whiteness is socially constructed rather than naturally pre-existing. She theorizes "from experience" to offer a unique perspective that retains the strength of a theoretical foundation as well as the relatability of personal narratives. She interviews thirty white women to get their perspectives on various racial topics and gain a critical standpoint for thinking about individual and social forces that construct and maintain whiteness in contemporary society. She begins with the question, "What is white women's relationship to racism?" The women discuss various aspects of interracial courtship, the role of power in acknowledging racial differences, and the function of language in facing and overcoming the negative effects of this difference.
In recent years there has been a growing recognition that a mature analysis of scientific and technological activity requires an understanding of its spatial contexts. Without these contexts, indeed, scientific practice as such is scarcely conceivable. Making Space for Science brings together contributors with diverse interests in the history, sociology and cultural studies of science and technology since the Renaissance. The editors aim to provide a series of studies, drawn from the history of science and engineering, from sociology and sociology and science, from literature and science, and from architecture and design history, which examine the spatial foundations of the sciences from a number of complementary perspectives.
This collection of essays aims to further the understanding of historical and contemporary geographies of science. It offers a fresh perspective on comparative approaches to scientific knowledge and practice as pursued by geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians of science. The authors explore the formation and changing geographies of scientific centers from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and critically discuss the designing of knowledge spaces in early museums, in modern laboratories, at world fairs, and in the periphery of contemporary science. They also analyze the interactions between science and the public in Victorian Britain, interwar Germany, and recent environmental policy debates. The book provides a genuine geographical perspective on the production and dissemination of knowledge and will thus be an important point of reference for those interested in the spatial relations of science and associated fields.
In 1900 W. E. B. DuBois prophesied that the colour line would be the key problem of the twentieth-century and he later identified one of its key dynamics: the new religion of whiteness that was sweeping the world. Whereas most historians have confined their studies of race-relations to a national framework, this book studies the transnational circulation of people and ideas, racial knowledge and technologies that under-pinned the construction of self-styled white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show how in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century these countries worked in solidarity to exclude those they defined as not-white, actions that provoked a long international struggle for racial equality. Their findings make clear the centrality of struggles around mobility and sovereignty to modern formulations of both race and human rights.
The British Empire gave rise to various new forms of British identity in the colonial world outside the Dominions. In cities and colonies, and in sovereign states subject to more informal pressures, such as Argentina or China, communities of Britons developed and they developed identities inflected by local ambitions and pressures. As a result they often found themselves at loggerheads with their diplomatic or colonial office minders, especially in the era of decolonization. The impact of empire on metropolitan British identity is increasingly well documented; the evolution of dominions' nationalisms is likewise well known; but the new species of Britishness which attained their fullest form in the midtwentieth century have received significantly less attention, even though empire's propagandists celebrated their achievements at the time, and they paid close attention themselves to the fine detail of their own identities. This volume revisits the communities formed by these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Britons, as well as the passages home some took, and it assesses their development, character, and legacy today. Scholars with established expertise in the history of each region explore the communalities that can be found across British communities in South, East and Southeast Asia, Egypt, and East and Southern Africa, and highlight the particularities that were also distinctive features of each British experience. These overseas Britons were sojourners and settlers; some survive in postindependent states, others were swept out quickly and moved on, or back to an often uninterested metropolitan Britain. They have often been caricatured and demonized, but understanding them is important for an understanding of the states in which they lived, whose politics they were at times a crucial part of, British history, and the history of migration and settlement.
Written by one of the world's leading historians of political thought and published over the past three decades, the purpose of these essays is to present British history as the history of several nations interacting with--and sometimes seceding from--association with an imperial state. The commentary presents this history as that of an archipelago, situated in oceans and expanding across them to the Antipodes. Both New Zealand history and ways of seeing history formed in New Zealand enter into the vision. © in this collection J. G. A. Pocock 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, this book builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that 'a colonized people is not alone', the book significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.
This pioneering 2006 volume addresses the question of how Britain's empire was lived through everyday practices - in church and chapel, by readers at home, as embodied in sexualities or forms of citizenship, as narrated in histories - from the eighteenth century to the present. Leading historians explore the imperial experience and legacy for those located, physically or imaginatively, 'at home,' from the impact of empire on constructions of womanhood, masculinity and class to its influence in shaping literature, sexuality, visual culture, consumption and history-writing. They assess how people thought imperially, not in the sense of political affiliations for or against empire, but simply assuming it was there, part of the given world that had made them who they were. They also show how empire became a contentious focus of attention at certain moments and in particular ways. This will be essential reading for scholars and students of modern Britain and its empire.
During the tumultuous closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the prospect of democracy loomed and as intensified global economic and strategic competition reshaped the political imagination, British thinkers grappled with the question of how best to organize the empire. Many found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain, a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and southern Africa. In The Idea of Greater Britain, Duncan Bell analyzes this fertile yet neglected debate, examining how a wide range of thinkers conceived of this vast "Anglo-Saxon" political community. Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious--creating a globe-spanning nation-state--to the practical and mundane--reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. But all of these ideas were motivated by the disquiet generated by democracy, by challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global cooperation and communication that anticipated today's globalization debates. Exploring attitudes toward the state, race, space, nationality, and empire, as well as highlighting the vital theoretical functions played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, Bell illuminates important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.
This book reappraises Australia's experience of empire since the end of the British Empire. The volume examines the meaning and importance of empire in Australia across a broad spectrum of historical issues - ranging from the disinheritance of the Aborigines to the foundations of a new democratic state. The overriding theme is the distinctive Australian perspective on empire. The country's adherence to imperial ideals and aspirations involved not merely the building of a 'new Britannia' but also the forging of a distinctive new culture and society. It was Australian interests and aspirations which ultimately shaped 'Australia's Empire'. While modern Australians have often played down the significance of their British imperial past, the chapters in this book argue that the legacies of empire continue to influence the temper and texture of Australian society today.
Focusing on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914, this book provides a perspective on the relationship between empire and globalisation. It shows how distinct structures of economic opportunity developed around the people who settled across a wider British World through the co-ethnic networks they created. Yet these networks could also limit and distort economic growth. The powerful appeal of ethnic identification often made trade and investment with racial 'outsiders' less appealing, thereby skewing economic activities toward communities perceived to be 'British'. By highlighting the importance of these networks to migration, finance and trade, this book contributes to debates about globalisation in the past and present. It reveals how the networks upon which the era of modern globalisation was built quickly turned in on themselves after 1918, converting racial, ethnic and class tensions into protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia. Avoiding such an outcome is a challenge faced today.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were increasingly drawn together by an imperial press system. This is the first scholarly study of the development of that system. Revealed to contemporaries by the South African War, the basis on which the system would develop soon became the focus for debate. Commercial organizations, including newspaper combinations and news agencies such as Reuters, fought to protect their interests, while 'constructive imperialists' attempted to enlist the power of the state to strengthen the system. Debate culminated in fierce controversies over state censorship and propaganda during and after the First World War. Based on extensive archival research, this study addresses crucial themes, including the impact of empire on the press, Britain's imperial experience, and the idea of a 'British world'. Challenging earlier nationalist accounts, the author draws out the ambiguous impact of the imperial press system on local, national, and imperial identities.
The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, 'has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire' and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the 'white dominions'; the commercial empire of the City of London; and 'Greater India' which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle. This unprecedented history charts how this intricate imperial web was first strengthened, then weakened and finally severed on the rollercoaster of global economic, political and geostrategic upheaval on which it rode from beginning to end.
With the advent of multinational corporations, the traditional urban service function has 'gone global'. In order to provide services to globalizing corporate clients, the offices of major financial and business service firms across the world have formed a network. It is the myriad of flows between office towers in different metropolitan centres that has produced a world city network. Through an analysis of the intra-company flows of 100 leading global service firms across 315 cities, this book assesses cities in terms of their overall network connectivity, their connectivity by service sector, and their connectivity by world region. Peter Taylor's unique and illuminating book provides the first comprehensive and systematic description and analysis of the world city network as the 'skeleton' upon which contemporary globalization has been built. His analyses challenge the traditional view of the world as a 'mosaic map' of political boundaries. Written by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, this book provides a much needed mapping of the connecting relationships between world cities, and will be an enlightening book for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and planning.
Why does so much of the world speak English? This book gives a new answer to that question, uncovering a 'Settler Revolution' that took place from the early 19th century that led to the explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin, the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Between 1780 and 1930, the number of English-speakers rocketed from 12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew to match. Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans and mountains, a revolutionary upward shift in attitudes to emigration, the emergence of a settler 'boom mentality', and a late flowering of non-industrial technologies - wind, water, wood, and work animals - especially on settler frontiers. This revolution combined with the Industrial Revolution to transform settlement into something explosive - capable of creating great cities like Chicago and Melbourne and large socio-economies in a single generation. The 'Settler Revolution' was not exclusive to the Anglophone countries - Argentina, Siberia, and Manchuria also experienced it. But it was the Anglophone settlers who managed to integrate frontier and metropolis most successfully, and it was this that gave them the impetus and the material power to provide the world's leading super-powers for the last 200 years.
The rise of the Yorkshire societies in New Zealand coincided with the maturation of the British Dominions. Emerging as modern nations in their own right, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada were conscious of the need to consolidate selected cultural influences to inform the development of distinctive national identities. Given the fact that the English in New Zealand were the single largest British immigrant group, there seemed to be little need to assert or celebrate ‘Englishness’ and this was in stark contrast to the Scots whose widespread associational culture has been well-documented. Importantly, however, the emergence of Yorkshire, as opposed to English, societies reveals the crossroads of the immigrant experience: the dual identity. Asserting the importance of Yorkshire, its working-class culture and its people, as an important and defining facet of British success became very important at a time when immense social and economic changes were sweeping across Britain. The rise of Yorkshire societies abroad illuminates the desire for a greater recognition of the role played by the north in Britain's development at home and abroad. By examining the prevalence of Yorkshire societies in New Zealand, their membership, aims and activities, this article sheds new light on regional loyalties within English immigrant communities and their connection to Britain's imperial authority.
This paper discusses the utility of the term 'Britishness' in the context of the 'British World' conference series. It suggests reasons why the 'British world' idea as presently understood was relatively slow to emerge out of traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial and commonwealth history. Ranging over more than a century from the 1870s to the present, it surveys uses of the term 'British' in imperial historiography and draws most of its empirical evidence from the unusual case of South Africa. The paper eschews 'ethnic' or 'racial' definitions of Britishness and proposes instead a more capacious formulation capable of including elective, hyphenated forms of belonging. It suggests that there are advantages in thinking of the British Empire less in the possessive sense - the empire that belonged to Britain - and more in the adjectival mode as a mode of description capable of taking into account self-declared affinities and values.
British clubs and societies spread around the English-speaking world in the long nineteenth century. This article focuses on one particularly large friendly society, the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (MU), which by 1913 had more than a thousand lodges around the world, especially concentrated in Australia and New Zealand. The MU spread so widely because of micro-social and macro-social forces, both of which this article investigates. It also examines the transfer of members, funds, and information between different districts of the society, and argues that such transfers may have smoothed internal and long-distance migration.
The essay examines a range of geographical practices used in understanding the geography of Scotland in the late seventeenth century in the work of Sir Robert Sibbald, John Adair, Robert Wodrow, and Martin Martin. Attention is paid to the ways in which geographical knowledge in this period was based not simply upon mapping, reporting, and direct personal encounter but upon establishing trust and credibility and in negotiating social boundaries. The issues of trust and reliance on the word of others, as on the accuracy of one's instruments, are used to raise different questions about the nature of geographical knowledge as a practical science and about the local and situated place of geography in the development of early modern science.
In recent times there has been a remarkable spatial turn within a variety of academic discourses. Historians, social theorists, anthropologists, and philosophers have all redrawn attention to the constitutive significance of place and space, site and situation, locality and territoriality. After briefly sketching some of the major features of this 'geographical recovery', I examine some of its implications for the study of the scientific enterprise. Such issues as the regionalisation of scientific style, the political topography of scientific commitment, and the social and material spaces of laboratories and scientific societies are considered. These materials provide both a framework and a suite of case studies for the elaboration of a historical geography of science. Last, I briefly draw attention to some implications that a spatialised historiography has for understanding the history of the geographical tradition itself.
BucknerPhillip and FrancisR. Douglas, eds. Rediscovering the British World. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. Pp. 445. $54.95 (cloth). - Volume 46 Issue 2 - Sujit Sivasundaram
Considerable attention has been paid to the ideas of critics of the British Empire in the period of its most rapid expansion and rather less to the views of those who supported it strongly. This article investigates the arguments of what are called , showing how they used the language of character, stiffened by elements from earlier languages of virtue, to justify the possession of empire. They argued that character had been critical in making Britain an imperial power and also claimed that, without the stimulus to action and duty provided by the defence and the governance of empire, character would atrophy, and the nation would suffer catastrophic and irreversible decline. The article ends by comparing the position with that of, firstly, the larger body of more pragmatic supporters of empire and, secondly, the small group of radical anti-imperialists who feared that empire was destructive of character.
Part of an ongoing scholarly project to rediscover and reintegrate the history of British Empire-building with that of domestic politics, culture, society, and intellectual life, Duncan Bell's The Idea of Greater Britain documents a hitherto submerged strain of Victorian thought advocating a federated world state with Britain at its core. The book is deeply researched in private papers as well as a remarkably broad array of published tracts, letters, speeches, and other writings by Victorian thinkers.
From the 1860s, fear of imperial decline in the face of geopolitical rivals including Germany, Russia, and the United States produced a sense of cultural crisis in Britain. Canada's attainment of responsible government in 1867 made imperial disintegration appear inevitable. Developments at home such as crass, soulless Manchesterism and democratization, raising the socialist bogey, seemed harbingers of degeneration. Seeking a remedy for this multifarious malaise, advocates of Greater Britain wished to allow for the white settler colonies' eventual independence while maintaining some form of political unity. Just as the contemporaneous New Imperialism was embraced as the panacea for a multitude of ills, Greater Britain was expected to solve myriad domestic and geopolitical problems. Most importantly, it would allow the settler colonies to have the self-government they sought and might simply seize eventually without compromising British imperial prestige and power.
Persistently vague about actual plans for fear of scaring off potential support, an array of eminent Victorians from J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse, who were ambivalent at best, to Charles Dilke, J. A. Froude, and Joseph Chamberlain—the last "vociferous" in his advocacy (56)—promoted their various visions of Greater Britain. The author acknowledges the contradictory and even half-baked character of most thinking and writing on the subject. Champions of Greater Britain did not agree about which territories ought to be included: some favored the whole Empire, others only the settler colonies, while still others included the United States. Some, for example, favored Irish Home Rule as a step toward a global federation, while most racialized Celtic and Catholic identity to exclude the Irish entirely. Greater Britain never came to fruition, mainly because the settler states whose cooperation was vital to the scheme had no interest in it and demanded fuller independence. Fears of disarranging the Constitution and thereby prompting revolution also stayed reformers' hands.
Conversely, the very vagueness and variety of view among its advocates rendered the idea of Greater Britain palatable to an otherwise incompatible array of opinion. Bell compares the views of J. R. Seeley, advocate of Greater Britain, with those of anti-imperialist and opponent Goldwin Smith to show that they actually shared a broad consensus about the world and Britain's place in it. Both partook of racial Anglo-Saxonism, justifying continued British domination of the Empire through an organic unity enforcing "global bonds of tradition and race" (181). Smith remained disdainful of the Irish and Indians, justifying continued British rule.
Although writing during the heyday of New Imperialism, advocates of Greater Britain essentially ignored Africa, while most found various cultural or racial arguments for excluding Ireland and India from their schemes. All relied on racialized and naturalized conceptions of Anglo-Saxonism to justify the domination and even extermination of colonized people, if they were acknowledged at all. Rehabilitating settlers from brutal racist thugs to sturdy yeomen, settler colonialism was re-envisioned as the majestic, natural, "organic" spread of superior people into underutilized territory. Moral laxity would be vanquished in favor of noble and selfless "civic imperialism," while degenerate slum-dwellers would be reinvigorated by shipping them off to the colonies. Overseas territories could serve as laboratories for progressive experiments to be reimported to Britain if successful, appealing to liberals and socialists. Greater Britain would act as guarantor of security and peace.
The Idea of Greater Britain seems to speak directly to current apologists for globalization. Paeans to the steamship and telegraph, ostensibly rendering time and space obsolete as impediments to global domination, included Rudyard Kipling's pronouncement "they have killed their father time" (qtd. in Bell 77). Repudiating the classical empires that formed the model for the Pax Britannica, Greater Britain boosters looked to the United States for models of imperium without end...
For much of the twentieth century, Australia's commercial dealings with Great Britain were profoundly influenced by the idea that Australia was a ‘British country’.Sentimental assumptions about a worldwide community of British peoples underpinned the sense of an organic imperial community of mutual self‐interest. This article explores the intersection between sentiment and self‐interest in the evolution of the Anglo‐Australian relationship, tracing the wide‐ranging manifestations of ‘British race patriotism’ in Australian commercial culture. It is argued that the demise of the imperial ideal in Australia can only be fully comprehended in terms of the radical changes in Australia's international economic prospects occasioned by the British shift towards a European trading future in the 1960s.
Over the past 30 years or so, historians of the British Empire and Commonwealth have concentrated on two processes: the acquisition of the empire and its decolonization. As a result, nearly all attention has fallen on the non-white or tropical empire. This was not always so. Earlier generations, stretching back to Seeley and Dilke, were more interested in what was variously called the empire of settlement, the old Dominions, or 'Greater Britain'. The British diaspora, or 'British world', the overseas Britons who occupied the consensual empire, and the non-British loyalists who shared it, has only recently again become a proper subject for investigation. What were the ties that bound this world? What were its characteristics? When did it reach its apogee and what became of it? The 'British World' conferences in London in 1998 and in Cape Town in 2001 have begun the complex task of trying to find answers. Another conference in Calgary in July 2003 will continue it.
The concept of ‘networks’ in the British world has captivated the attention of historians in recent years, with theoretical frameworks now offered to chart the chronology of such phenomena. This article examines these frameworks critically through the lens of British world municipalities, examining the transfer of people and ideas between 1890 and 1939. It contemplates the significance of British world publications such as the Municipal Journal, appearing after 1890, in the facilitation of British world progressivism and its role in formalising networks; also the travels of municipal employees and the correspondence of town clerks in the first half of the twentieth century. Consideration is given to the place of Australian and New Zealand cities in such global networks. The article reflects on whether a move from ‘ad hoc’ networks before 1914 to more formal ones after 1920 is a credible way of characterising the period from the perspective of the Southern hemisphere cities.
An increasingly rigidifying orthodoxy has begun to emerge within Marxist spatial analysis that threatens to choke off the development of a critical theory of space in its infancy. The concept of a socio-spatial dialectic is introduced as a means of reopening the debate and calling for the explicit incorporation of the social production of space in Marxist analysis as something more than an epiphenomenon. Building upon the works of Henri Lefebvre, Ernest Mandel, and others, a general spatial problematic is identified and discussed within the context of both urban and regional political economy. The spatial problematic is not a substitute for class analysis but it can be an integral and increasingly salient element in class consciousness and class struggle within contemporary capitalism.Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be “purely” formal, the epitome of rational abstraction, it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident on the landscape. Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies.
